Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

4 °^38 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

article, the first Marx ever published, was greeted enthusiastically by his

friends: Jung wrote to him that 'your article on the freedom of the Press

is superb',^161 and Ruge wrote in similar vein: 'your commentary in the

paper on the freedom of the Press is marvellous. It is certainly the best

that has been written on the subject.'^162

Marx was all the more eager to earn a living through journalism as he

quarrelled definitively with his mother at the end of June 1842 and was

deprived of all financial help from his family. 'For six weeks', he wrote,

'I had to stay in Trier because of a new death and the rest of the time

was wasted and upset through the most disagreeable of family controver-

sies. My family has put difficulties in my way which, despite their own

prosperity, subject me to the most straitened circumstances.'^163 This quar-

rel was so violent that Marx left the family house in the Simeonstrasse

and put up in a nearby guest house. He remained in Trier until the

wedding of his sister Sophie and in mid-July left for Bonn where he could

devote himself uninterruptedly to journalism.

In spite of the tense atmosphere in Trier, Marx had found time while

there to compose another major contribution to the Rheinische Zeitung.

By June 1842 the paper's radical tone provoked its large rival, the Kolnische

Zeitung, into launching an attack on its 'dissemination of philosophical

and religious views by means of newspapers',^164 and claiming in a leading

article that religious decadence involved political decadence. Marx

believed the reverse to be true:

If the fall of the states of antiquity entails the disappearance of the

religions of these states, it is not necessary to go and look for another

explanation, for the 'true religion' of the ancients was the cult of 'their

nationality', of their 'State'. It is not the ruin of the ancient religions

that entailed the fall of the states of antiquity, but the fall of the states

of antiquity that entailed the ruin of the ancient religions.^165

Marx went on to defend the right of philosophy - 'the spiritual quintess-
ence of its time' - to comment freely on all questions, and finished his
article with an outline of the ideal state according to modern philosophy,
that is, Hegel and after.

But if the previous professors of constitutional law have constructed

the state from instincts either of ambition or sociability or even from

reason, but from the individual's reason and not social reason, the

profounder conception of modern philosophy deduces the state from

the idea of the all. It considers the state as the great organism in which

juridical, moral and political liberties must be realised and in which each

citizen, by obeying the laws of the state, only obeys the natural laws of

his own reason, human reason. Sapienti sat.'^66